February 14, 2013

Mathematics Colloquium today

Oded Yacobi from University of Toronto will present "A Tour of Categorical Representation Theory" at 2:30 p.m. today in 122 Cardwell Hall.

Classical representation theory concerns group actions on vector spaces. In the 1990's it was discovered that finite dimensional representations of Lie groups possess a profound symmetry, which suggested these representations are shadows of a "higher" structure. In other words they come from group actions on categories. Making this notion precise is quite subtle and has led to some amazing advances. Yacobi will introduce this subject from the point of view of modular representation theory of the symmetric group, and describe the results relating the category of polynomial functors and generalizations thereof to this story. Yacobi will then describe an ongoing program to apply the tools from categorical representation theory to some geometric questions arising from the affine grassmannian.